Making your business deliver for you and your family

Join us for a workshop to learn about creating a sound business structure for a modern dairy farm and how to manage it on a day-to-day basis.

With rules and red tape, market volatility, rising costs and whether you want your children to be able to farm, it highlights just how important it is to set up your business for now and the years to come.

You’ll hear about the role of your vision and mission, establishing policies and procedures and how a farm SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) can help make decisions for a profitable and sustainable future.

Strategic dairy farmer Dan Burdett will share what that means for his family farm in Sussex with the help of Andersons’ Business consultant Tony Evans.

During this interactive workshop, you’ll find out about:

• Planning short, medium and long term goals
• Succession strategies
• How much profit Dan needs to make
• Setting up a board and who is accountable
• Meeting legal and regulatory systems
• What happens if one of the partners has an accident
• When to take time out for big-picture thinking

This is a closed workshop for dairy farm owners only

To book your place email Shirley.macmillan@ahdb.org.uk or for more information phone Knowledge Exchange Manager, Shirley Macmillan: 07766 402393

About Cockhaise Farm

An organic herd of just under 300 crossbreds yielding 6,000 litres, autumn-block calving within six weeks. Cockhaise Farm owns 142 ha and contract-farms or rents a further 162 ha. With just 8–12ha down to arable crops this means this farm is a grass-based unit operating multi-species swards including some 22 ha of lucerne and Timothy. The farm has been organic for 20 years and Dan is now the contractor, owning 90% of the cows on a 50:50 profit share basis. He employs two full-time and one-part time staff.

Find out more about Cockhaise Farm and compare your performance

About Strategic Dairy Farms

Strategic dairy farms aim to help farmers learn from each other through regular on-farm meetings where we will share key performance data and showcase what the best farmers are doing.

They form part of the Optimal Dairy Systems programme which aims to help dairy farmers reduce costs and increase efficiency by focusing on either a tight block or all-year-round calving system.

The growing network of strategic dairy farms have calculated KPIs for their enterprises which are shared at meetings and published online. These are physical and financial performance measures that are critical to success. Farmers can benchmark their businesses against these KPIs to help identify areas for improvement.

Follow the programme and explore other strategic farms